


a heart can truly gleam

by alpacasandravens



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Mary character study, Other, and you died in the 1980s, as in i haven't seen s12 in 4 years but it seems right, but it's hard when your kids are older than you, mary is trying to build herself a family, platonic Ketch & Mary, theyre friends!!, this is my bisexual mary winchester essay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 12:33:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29966436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: “Mom,” he says, turning slightly to face her, “this is Castiel. Cas, this is Mary. Winchester.”“Cas is an angel,” Dean says.Mary allows the gun to drop, pointed at the floor, but she keeps it in her hand.“Angel?” She asks. Does Dean mean angel as in of God? Because this man, with his ratty trench coat and serious need of sleep, doesn’t look like an angel. Then again, Dean had apparently seen God drink himself to sleep, so. But there’s something about the situation, about Dean looking back and forth between his mom and Castiel like he’s desperate for her approval, and Mary thinks maybe Dean means angel in a more colloquial sense. Which she absolutely cannot think about.
Relationships: Arthur Ketch & Mary Winchester, Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Mary Winchester, Mary Winchester & Sam Winchester, Past John Winchester/Mary Winchester - Relationship
Comments: 9
Kudos: 102





	a heart can truly gleam

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for lots of minor homophobia (from Mary trying to adjust to 2016 - she's not meaning to be homophobic and actively works to be better) and a couple vague mentions of major homophobia/people using slurs (from John Winchester and others, all are in reference to Mary thinking about memories of the '80s).  
> Yes this is inspired by that post of Dean introducing Cas to Mary in 12x01 with 'queers??????' as Mary's reaction. No I cannot find that post now to link it (I looked). No I will not be taking criticism. 
> 
> Title from Our Own House by Misterwives because even though it doesn't fit this fic yes it does.

Mary Winchester is twenty-nine years old, and life is good. 

She has a house in the suburbs of Lawrence and two baby boys and a husband she loves, and she hasn’t been on a hunt in five years. It’s not perfect - nothing could be, not for her. She misses hunting as much as she hates it, always looking over her shoulder in the dark, fingers twitching to grab a gun that isn’t there. There are still bags of salt in her car, and they’re not just for the winter snows. She’s clinging to John like a life raft, even though they fight regularly and only last month he’d moved out for a few days. But it was nothing serious, because it couldn’t be, because if this falls apart she has nowhere to go.

She lays Sammy down in his crib, gives the mobile a little tap before she leaves. The tiny figures spin in the air, and Sammy looks up at them, eyes wide. 

Dean is quiet when she tucks him in, but he shows her a drawing he did that afternoon, bright crayons and the coloring book outline of a tow truck. It’s not as wild as some of his previous drawings have been - he’s making an effort to color between the lines. She doesn’t say it, but she kind of misses the random scribbles of color.

“I’ll put it on the fridge,” she says, and Dean smiles. 

He hugs her before crawling into bed, and after giving him a kiss on the forehead and smoothing down his hair, Mary tells him the same thing she says every night: “Angels are watching over you.” 

Three hours later, Mary hears cries coming from Sam’s room. She sees the man there and assumes it’s John, and the blind panic when she learns it isn’t doesn’t manage to drown out the realization that  _ it’s been ten years. _

And Mary feels her stomach slashed open, pain worse than she’s ever felt as the warm blood flows and soaks into her pajamas, drips along the floor as the man with the yellow eyes drags her across the ceiling with just a twitch of his finger. 

The flames start up, and she opens her mouth to scream.

~~

Mary opens her eyes. She can feel the memory of the flames fading, her body warm not from fire scorching it, melting her clothes to her body and her flesh from her bones, but from the sun shining down on her flannel. She hasn’t worn a flannel in years. 

It’s daytime, and she’s outside somewhere she doesn’t recognize. It looks like it could be Kansas, all flat plains and dry fields, but nowhere near Lawrence. A car that looks so much like John’s is parked on a pothole-ridden, dusty dirt road, and in front of it stands a man wearing the jeans-and-flannel uniform of a hunter. It’s been a long time, but she can still recognize where he has a gun tucked into his jeans, several knives barely noticeable under his henley and around his ankles. 

The man is looking at someone by Mary’s side - a beautiful woman in a black dress, out of place here in this middle of nowhere dirt patch. The woman casts a knowing glance at him before she walks to a short man squinting at the sun. She takes his hand, and -

They disappear. 

Mary’s seen a lot of disappearing in her life, but it’s usually been ghosts, flickering in and out of existence, fizzling out when confronted with salt or iron. Even the demon, when he’d wrecked her life, had to walk around like a person while he was inside someone. 

She wants to ask what happened, who those people were, but she doesn’t trust the man, and before she can open her mouth to say anything, he looks at her, face gutted but hopeful, and says

“Mom?”

The reunion doesn’t go well. 

It takes a lot for Mary to believe she’s truly been resurrected, and a hell of a lot more for her to accept that the year is 2016 and the thirty-something man in front of her is actually Dean. She’d tucked her Dean into bed just that evening, and he’d only been four. He’s lucky all she did to him was knock him to the ground. 

But he’d convinced her, and she is sitting in the front seat of John’s - Dean’s car, speeding to somewhere.

Dean puts a tape into the deck, and the sounds of Zepp fill the car.

“At least you’ve still got good music in the future,” Mary says, trying to break the ice.

Half of Dean’s mouth turns up in a smile, and he huffs what she thinks might be a laugh. “You should hear what Cas plays,” he says. “Half the time, I’m not convinced it’s music.” 

Mary raises an eyebrow. Dean hadn’t told her much, in that field - just a quick “I gotta get back, Sam and Cas are gonna think I’m dead.” When it was pretty clear her options were get in the car or get left in the field, Mary chose quickly.

“Dean,” she says, the name oddly heavy in her mouth, “what happened?”

“You’d never believe me.” 

Mary narrows her eyes at him, though she knows he can’t see it while looking at the road. “I just came back from the dead. Try me.”

And Dean rambles. This is more like the Dean she remembers, talking so excitedly he could slide from topic to topic, a train of thought that only he could understand but that didn’t matter so much when he was four and it jumped from dinosaurs to trucks to rocks and back around to fossils. This ramble goes something like this: hunting with Sam to dying and back to hunting but this time with angels (and when he said ‘angels’ he rolled his eyes) to Purgatory and something about Borax and then angels again. Mary has no idea what he was talking about.

Dean concludes with “So Amara brought you back, and she’s going on a universe road trip or whatever with Chuck.” 

Mary feels like her head has exploded. “Who is God.” 

“Yep.”

“I was resurrected by God.” 

“God’s sister,” Dean says, and laughs as though he realizes how insane that sounds. “You get used to it - it’s hard to take Chuck seriously as God when you’ve seen him passed out drunk on the couch.” 

There is nothing Mary could possibly say to respond to that. Here her son is, nearly forty years old and on first-name terms with God, who he doesn’t seem to like all that much. 

“Me and Sam, we’ve had our fair share of resurrections too,” Dean says, and Mary wants to ask him to stop talking. She needs to know what happened, how her son grew up to hunt like it was second nature, but everything he’s saying makes her brain feel like it’s melting out of her ears.

Or not, actually. It was painful in a different way, in the way of having your entire worldview forcefully rewritten by a guy who didn’t seem to think that much of it.

“So you hunt with Sam,” Mary asks in a desperate attempt to get the conversation back to somewhere close to something she can handle.

Dean nods. “And Cas, yeah.”

“And Cas is…”

There are so many possible answers to this question. She thinks she remembers something from Dean’s ramble about ‘pulled me outta hell,’ but she’s not sure if that was a metaphor - she hopes it was - and she definitely heard something about this Cas and… whatever the Borax thing was. 

“Our friend,” Dean says, a soft smile passing over his face. 

Mary nods. Hunters aren’t known for making friends, but she’s glad her sons have one. 

“He should be at the bunker,” Dean says as though Mary has any idea what the bunker is. “He’s gonna be pissed I didn’t tell him I survived, but hey. Phone’s busted.” 

Mary sighs and accepts that she just isn’t going to be able to understand anything that comes out of her son’s mouth. Maybe somewhere there’s a little dictionary of ‘how to understand 2016-speak’ that she can read. 

Dean parks in a garage filled with cars that make the Impala look new. Rows of Mustangs, Aston Martins, even Harleys, models that Mary recognizes as vintage. He doesn’t glance at them, walks by them like they’re nothing and unlocks a door at the back of the garage. Mary takes longer, awed by the sheer amount of things, the wealth that’s so casually displayed.

“Did you and Sam get rich after I…” Mary still can’t say ‘died’, not yet. It’s too recent a memory for her. 

“Nah, these ain’t ours,” Dean says. “Came with the place. ‘Sides, legally I’m a dead man.” 

He walks through the door into what Mary assumes must be the bunker, leaving her more confused than ever. 

That impression of wealth continues as Mary steps inside. The bunker must be underground, because there’s no windows anywhere, but the garage enters into a long hallway lined with closed doors. Near the end of the hall, there’s a kitchen, empty now but obviously lived-in, a worn wooden table with an empty water glass on the right, and counters strewn with random food - garlic bulbs, a bag of pretzels, a bunch of bananas. 

After the kitchen there’s a library, and this room alone is bigger than Mary’s entire high school library, probably bigger than anything even her family had access to back in their hunting days. And she doesn’t need to see much to notice that these are hunting books - that would be obvious enough from the sigils on the spines of some, the careless way there’s a pistol left on the table and the knife carefully taped to the table’s side. 

Dean only just pulled out a chair when a tan blur launches itself at him. 

In the doorway, Mary draws a gun, holding it at Dean. The blur, once it’s stopped running, turns out to be a man, slightly older than Dean and with eye bags bigger than Mary’s ever seen. He wears an ill-fitting tan trench coat, which hangs around Dean, as the man has latched onto Dean and is hugging him fiercely. 

“I thought you died,” the man says angrily when he finally pulls away. 

If he’s angry at Dean for almost dying, Mary thinks this man probably isn’t a threat, but she keeps her gun raised anyway. 

“The soul-bomb didn’t go off,” Dean says, and while that makes exactly no sense to Mary, clearly it does to this man, because he nods. “Amara decided to stop being evil, I guess.” 

Something softens in the man’s face, and Mary’s pretty sure he’s about to hug Dean again when Dean seems to remember Mary’s existence.

“Mom,” he says, turning slightly to face her, “this is Castiel. Cas, this is Mary. Winchester.” 

Castiel, who must be the Cas that Dean mentioned in the car, looks between Dean and Mary. “Your mother,” he says. 

“Cas is an angel,” Dean says. 

Mary allows the gun to drop, pointed at the floor, but she keeps it in her hand. 

“Angel?” She asks. Does Dean mean angel as in of God? Because this man, with his ratty trench coat and serious need of sleep, doesn’t look like an angel. Then again, Dean had apparently seen God drink himself to sleep, so. But there’s something about the situation, about Dean looking back and forth between his mom and Castiel like he’s desperate for her approval, and Mary thinks maybe Dean means angel in a more colloquial sense. Which she absolutely cannot think about.

“Y’know, wings, harp,” Dean says.

Castiel gives Dean a side-eye that really doesn’t rule out the angel-as-a-pet-name theory. “I do not have a harp.” 

Dean shrugs. “But you’ve got wings.” 

Mary cannot see any wings. She wonders what the hell she is doing in 2016, and whether this will ever get less confusing.

It does, a little. Slowly, in between rescuing Sam from where he’d apparently been kidnapped by some British woman and the drive back to the bunker, Mary learns about the world. She gets a phone, one with a touch screen she can keep in her pocket, and she programs Dean and Sam’s numbers into it. She asks Sam what’s happened since she died, and Sam’s version is a lot less rambly than Dean’s and a lot more impersonal. Sam runs her through climate change, the war in the middle east, and he’s getting up to the presidential election that’s about to happen when Dean walks in with a case. 

The case is simple, it’s good. Mary gets her feet back on the ground, and hunting is just as natural to her as it had been five - or thirty-seven, depending on how you look at it - years ago. She burns the haunted stuffed animal and thinks that she never got to be a mom, but she can be a hunter. Sam and Dean are waiting for her back at the car, and they’re strangers.

She’s going to leave. She knows that, but she also knows it’s not time yet. That she can stay for a little while, hang around for a week or so before she has to think about who she’s going to be. 

Castiel is the only one to notice. 

He asks her about it, one afternoon in the library. Mary is on her computer researching literally everything, and Castiel is sitting across from her, holding a cup of coffee in his hands as though to warm them, despite the bunker’s pleasant temperature. 

“You’re going to leave, aren’t you.” It’s a soft statement, but not one Mary can ignore. There is something about Castiel that’s like that, she’s noticed. That even when he’s gentle, there’s steel behind his eyes. 

Mary looks up from her computer. “How did you know?”

“You look the same way I feel before I leave,” Castiel says. “Determined but wistful.” 

“I can’t stay.” 

Castiel takes a sip of his coffee. “I wouldn’t try and convince you to.” 

“Then why…” She doesn’t finish her sentence because she doesn’t need to. Castiel knows what she’s saying. 

“Dean wants you here,” he says. “He just doesn’t know how to tell you.” He waits until something on Mary’s face signals that she’s accepted that before continuing. “But just because Dean wants that doesn’t mean you can’t need to be elsewhere.” 

It’s strange, Mary thinks, how accepting he sounds. From anyone else, those words would be aggressive. They would be an unsubtle hint for her to get out, saying that Dean was the only one who wanted her here. But from Castiel, they are simply understanding. 

“I can’t be his mother,” she says. “I need to leave to know how to be myself.” 

Castiel nods. “Dean has told me stories about you,” he says. “When you know how to be yourself, spend some time with Dean. I think he should meet you.” 

“He knows me.” Even as she says it, Mary knows it’s a lie. She doesn’t know herself, not anymore, not with the entire life she’d built ripped away from her. 

Castiel looks at her, and Mary feels like he looks through her. It’s times like this where she can understand him as something unearthly, the way his gaze sinks right to her soul. 

“Dean has a tendency to put those he loves on a pedestal. Yours is highest of all.” 

On some level, Mary had known that. That the person Dean saw when he looked at her wasn’t really her, just the memories of a toddler who couldn’t see the cracks in their family. But it hurts to hear it confirmed from this man, who is practically a stranger. 

Still, something in his tone is sympathetic, and so she asks “What about yours?” 

He smiles, but it’s sad. “I destroyed mine a long time ago.”

“And does he see you more clearly for it?” 

Castiel shakes his head. “Sometimes, I don’t think he sees me at all.” 

He stands up, and though Mary’s eyes return to her computer screen, her mind is miles away. She can’t stay here, not in this underground place where an angel of the lord talks about her adult son with a melancholy adoration, where Sam sees her as another hunter and Dean can’t separate her from the construct of a mother she’d tried to make herself in what she’s only now starting to see as another time. But she doesn’t know where to go. 

In the end, Sam understands. Dean is hurt and won’t let himself show it, but Sam takes Mary aside and tells her about the time he left for Stanford.

“Keep in touch,” he says. “We might not be your kids anymore, but you’re still family.”

Mary nods and lets Sam hug her, and only a bone-deep, sorrowful understanding that things have changed lets her be enveloped by this man nearly a foot taller than her. It’s been long enough that cradling baby Sammy in her arms isn’t an immediate memory, but she can still picture it distinctly. 

_ This is who my baby became _ , she thinks,  _ and I wasn’t there to see it _ . That thought alone is almost enough for her to change her mind, to stick around and see what else her sons become. But she thinks back to Castiel’s conversation in the library, and she knows that what she needs isn’t here. 

~~

Mary is in a bar with Ketch. She isn’t sure she likes Ketch - he’s posh and untrustworthy and always keeping secrets - but being with him is easy in a way that being at the bunker hadn’t been. There is no weight of expectation with Ketch. She is a good hunter, and that’s it. 

“We thought it was a small pack,” Ketch is saying, “but when we arrived, there were twenty vampires just waiting for us.” 

“Twenty?” Mary asks. She’s not really impressed, and Ketch knows it, but she can roll with it anyway. It’s what he expects her to say. 

Still, her boredom must be obvious, because a man only slightly taller than her with a scruffy beard sidles over to where they sit at the bar. 

“Need a refill?” he asks. 

There’s something in his voice that Mary doesn’t like. It’s expectant, almost, like he assumes she’ll be grateful for swooping in to ‘save’ her from a boring flirt. 

“She’s good, thanks,” Ketch interrupts.

Mary’s suddenly, irrationally angry. She had been going to say that, but now that Ketch has said it for her, she almost wants to take the man up on his offer. But she looks back at him, and the man’s mouth has curled up into just the beginning of a sneer.

“No, thanks,” Mary says, hating the way she echoed Ketch’s words. 

As soon as the man wanders off, looking for the next bored-looking woman at the bar he can try and sleep with, Mary turns on Ketch.

“What the hell was that?” she says.

Ketch raises an eyebrow. “I could see the grease on him from across the room. I bet he doesn’t even wash his underwear.” He gives Mary a look like this should be an inside joke, and Mary tamps down the urge to steal his keys and just leave. “You could do better.”

“What, like you?”

He gives her that look again. “If you wanted.” When she glares at him, though, he changes tack. “Or anyone you want. But if you’re going to go for somebody else-” and here he winks, the bastard, like that’ll make Mary any less mad at him, “pick someone with basic hygiene.”

Mary does leave, then. The bar isn’t too far from their motel, maybe a mile, so she walks. It’s late, but the late summer air is warm and heavy with the hint of rain later. She hasn’t had much to drink, so she’s clear-headed, keeping one eye out as she follows the sidewalks through what could, generously, be called a town. 

When Ketch unlocks their door, sometime after three in the morning, Mary sits up to squint at him. Even from across the room, it’s pretty clear that he’s wrecked - his normally pristine button-down has been untucked from his slacks, and it’s done up wrong - he skipped one button near the top, making a bubble of fabric. 

“Where have you been?” Mary’s words slur from sleep, and she rubs the corner of her eye. Suddenly, her pajama shirt doesn’t seem thick enough, and she feels weirdly exposed.

Ketch shrugs, kicking his shoes off in a much less dignified manner than anything she’d ever seen him do before. “Out. Apologies if I disturbed you.” 

If it was possible for Mary to narrow her eyes any more, she would, but as it is she keeps squinting at him. “I’m sleeping,” she says, both as an instruction for him to be quiet and as a statement of her plans. 

She’s asleep before she can hear the hiss of the shower start up. 

Once Ketch has decided he’s never getting in Mary’s pants - and she would’ve let him, if he hadn’t been so obvious about it - he starts flirting with other people. All the time. 

It’s not annoying, because Mary isn’t jealous. It’s just… does he really have to do that all the time? But at least he’s decent about it. Mary’s known a lot of hunters that will flirt with just about any woman that moves, and she’s punched a good few of those men herself. Dropping lines on waitresses, even the witnesses they’re interviewing. But Ketch can turn it off, resolutely refusing to charm people on the clock even if they’re women Mary would class as his type. But that doesn’t mean he won’t send girls drinks in bars, drop a line every once in a while. 

The first time Mary sees him do that with another guy, it’s like a reset. She can almost hear the record scratch in her brain. 

She leaves the bar pretty quickly, leaving Ketch with the guy - average height, sandy hair, on the nice side of normal-looking. If Ketch hadn’t slid in there first, Mary would have hit on the guy herself. 

And that’s what gets her. Back when she was alive the first time, the only people she’d seen who were… like that, you could tell. It was men wearing sparkly clothes with polish on their fingers and lipstick on their faces, hurrying home while Mary was finishing up a hunt. But Ketch…

Mary had been traveling the country hunting with Ketch for a couple months now. She shares motel rooms with him, trusts him to have her back when a hunt gets particularly hairy. And she’s seen him flirt with girls. She’d had no idea, and that’s weird, because aren’t you supposed to know? To be able to tell?

Back in their room, Mary sits on the edge of her bed and fidgets. Her nails scratch over the seam on the edge of her jeans, the noise barely filling the silence. Her foot taps against the shitty carpeting. 

She should know about stuff like this. It’s not the ‘80s anymore, it’s a whole new century. She’d seen some articles about marriage equality during her deep dive into the news of the last thirty years, but she hadn’t read them deeply. It had just been a passing thought -  _ the queers can get married, good for them _ \- and she’d turned back to more important stuff, like what Siri was and why she kept talking to Mary out of nowhere. 

Maybe, she thinks, she should call Sam. Sam seems like he knows things about the world, like he cares deeply about people. But she doesn’t want to say the wrong thing, to make him think she would hate someone for something like that. Yeah, it’s… weird, but it’s not bad. 

Thinking that doesn’t mean she knows what she’s going to say to Ketch, though. She doesn’t think she’s ever known a queer before. 

She definitely can’t call Dean. Dean wouldn’t give her shit for saying something ignorant, true, but she thinks back to the way Castiel hugged him, the way both of them would smile like they were in their own little world just by mentioning the other, and she doesn’t want him to think she’s accusing him of anything. 

Although, the more she thinks about it, she’s pretty sure that it doesn’t count as an accusation if it’s true. But that’s probably worse. She doesn’t know what the word is for that, making someone tell you they’re a queer if they’re not ready, but even the idea of it feels like a violation. 

So now her singular friend is queer, and Dean probably is too. With a sigh, Mary gets out her laptop and starts googling. 

She doesn’t get very far on the internet before it gets too overwhelming. There are all sorts of websites, ones spouting very angry hatred and ones saying things with way too many syllables that are apparently ‘orientations’. (Mary’s not sure when things stopped being just ‘queer’ or ‘normal.’ Maybe things had always been more complicated than that, and she’d just never known.) It’s all so colorful, with more flags than she can count, and everybody seems to be fighting about something, and Mary closes all her tabs and shuts the laptop. She’ll just ask Ketch when he gets back. That’ll be good. 

Ketch doesn’t get back until the very early morning. The sun is starting to shine through the bottom of the thick motel curtain, spilling over the window unit AC and the stained carpet. It’s not bright enough outside to really lighten the room when he opens the door, but it’s enough to silhouette him. 

He’s much more put together than the first time he’d come back this late, or any of the other times, really. His shirt is buttoned right, and he’s taken the time to smooth his hair down until it doesn’t look like he’s just walked through a tornado. The light catches on him as he walks through the doorway, though, and there’s a reddish spot starting to purple on the side of his neck, just below his ear. 

Mary had, before Ketch came walking in quiet and wearing his skin of posh assurance like it didn’t quite fit, a plan of how she wanted to bring this up. That plan flies out the window now, and she says,

“So people are just allowed to be queer now?”

Ketch freezes, and Mary winces. 

“Shit, sorry,” she says, desperately trying to cover her tracks. “I meant. Is that a thing that’s okay now?”

He still doesn’t move, and Mary hates that. It’s weird that she saw him flirt with a man, and it’s weirder that she knows that man put the mark on his neck. But Ketch is just… Ketch. Weird and British and out of place just enough that Mary can relate but not enough to make him any less absurdly confident.

Until, apparently, now. 

“Your boys didn’t tell you about that?” It sounds like he’s trying for a lighthearted tone and only just falling short. 

Mary shakes her head. 

Ketch doesn’t say anything, just hums a slight note of interest. 

“And it’s… normal.” Mary says again. 

“Not everywhere, no,” Ketch says, slipping his shoes off by the door. “But the world has come a long way since the eighties.” 

He walks to the bathroom, and before he closes the door behind him, turns around. “I would try Wikipedia if you wanted to learn more,” he says, and disappears. The sound of the shower running is so routine that it soothes Mary. She doesn’t open her computer again that night, but she might in the future. She’d hate to say something that would make Dean as on edge as she’d just made Ketch, not when he’d finally started to open up to her. 

Later that week, when she does open Wikipedia, Mary still can’t quite wrap her head around it. So much has changed - she remembers when her father would proudly tell tales of ‘giving those freaks what they deserve’, when John would make offhand degrading comments. 

Christ, John - if she isn’t wrong about Dean, then… she doesn’t want to think about it. 

But if she can’t figure this out online, and she puts her foot in her mouth when she’s trying to talk with Ketch, then there’s really only one other option.

Mary picks up her phone and dials Sam. 

“Mom?” he says when he picks up. “Is everything okay?”

“Do things have to be bad for me to call?” She says it like she’s joking, but Mary knows she doesn’t talk to her boys enough. It’s just too weird for her, even now. 

“Course not. What’s up?”

Mary turns a hotel pen over in her fingers, poking the cap against her fingers. “Actually, I was hoping to talk to Castiel.” 

There is a pause, and Mary worries that she’s somehow managed to fuck up again. 

“Cas is on a case,” Sam says. “I could give you his number?”

Mary nods before she remembers Sam isn’t there to see her. “That would be good, yeah.” 

Things are similarly awkward when she calls Castiel. He picks up the phone and answers “Hello?” in a way that somehow manages to be both confused and hostile. 

“Hello, Castiel,” Mary says. It’s been a little too long when she says “It’s Mary,” because it takes her a bit to think that he probably wouldn’t recognize her voice. 

Castiel says “Hello” again in a much friendlier way. “May I ask why you’re calling?” 

Mary takes a breath. She really should have thought out some kind of script for this conversation before it started. But oh well, she’s already called.

“I was hoping you could explain the, uh, queer thing. I looked it up and…” she trails off. 

Castiel huffs a small laugh. “Are you calling me because I’m the only gay person you know?” 

“No,” Mary says. Truthfully, she hadn’t even realized Castiel was gay. This definitely had something to do with not understanding what, exactly, the word ‘gay’ signified - was it a synonym for queer, or did it mean something else? - but she’d definitely known he was queer, if only because his thing for Dean could probably be seen from space. Which she was absolutely not thinking about, ever.

“You’re very understanding,” she finally settles on. It’s the truth - Castiel has a way of making people feel welcome, if he wants to, that makes her much less afraid of messing things up than she is with her boys. That she didn’t know him before she died probably helps too. 

“So you think you’re queer?”

“No!” Mary blurts before she can stop herself. She isn’t, but why would it be bad if someone thought she might be? But she remembers her family’s words, news of the virus that was killing people left and right, and she knows why. “I’m just trying to understand.” 

“Okay,” he says patiently. 

But Mary can’t form sentences, ask questions about a thing so nebulous she has a hard time even thinking about it. 

“It’s… okay?” she asks instead. “In 2017?”

“It’s only humans that have ever viewed it as anything unnatural,” Castiel says. “God is queer.” And then, like he hadn’t just blown her mind by saying that so casually, he says “But yes, humans on the whole have become much more accepting than they were in the 1980s.”

When Mary doesn’t say anything, he continues. There is slight noise coming from his end, like he’s in a car. And isn’t that weird, Mary thinks, talking on a cell phone to an angel of the lord, who’s driving a car. 

“There’s something uniquely pointless about hating people for who they are, especially when it harms no one.” After a moment, he says “Is that what you wanted to ask?”

Mary shakes her head. “Yes, but… there’s so much on the Internet.”

Castiel hums in agreement. He waits for her to speak, and Mary is suddenly so thankful that this is someone her boys have in their life. Even though he barely knows her, Castiel is willing to take time out of his day to talk her through this. And he’s an angel. His days have to be more important than most. 

“Can you explain it to me?” 

“No,” Castiel says, and somehow he’s gentle about that too. From all the stories Dean told about angels, they were warriors. That Castiel can be gentle is something she can barely comprehend. “Everyone’s experience of queerness is different. You can learn the terms on your own, but not everyone will have the same understanding of the same word.” 

He pauses again, waiting for Mary to understand in a way that should feel condescending but instead just feels kind. “It’s about being yourself in a way that makes you happy. I use the word ‘gay’ when there are other words that could describe my experience because it is the one that I feel drawn to. I call myself a man because I am more comfortable with that than when I called myself anything else, and I continue to use this vessel because it makes me happier than my previous vessels. Does that make sense?” 

It does, strangely. It’s different than anything she’s ever heard - she thinks of the word ‘perversion,’ the way John’s voice had spat ‘deviant’ once - but it’s warmer. She’s still not sure what Castiel means by ‘vessel’, but she gets the feeling she doesn’t particularly want to know. 

“Thank you,” she says, and hopes he can tell just how much she means it. 

“Of course,” Castiel says. “I hope this was helpful.” 

“It was.” Mary thanks him again before she hangs up, and she falls back on the motel bed, staring at the ceiling. 

Mary cuts her hair the next day. 

That is, she tries to cut it by herself, taking a pair of safety scissors to it in the bathroom, but doesn’t get very far before Ketch raises his eyebrows. She gives him the scissors and he cuts it short, shorter than Mary’s ever worn her hair before. It falls around her chin, and when she looks at the pile of blond hair on the counter, she feels lighter than she’s ever felt. The haircut is choppy, clearly Ketch has never cut anyone’s hair before, but she’s grateful for it all the same. 

“You look nice,” Ketch says with a finger under her chin that might have been flirty at one point but now is just the way he interacts with her. 

“I feel good,” she says, and she smiles. 

A week later, Mary walks into a tattoo parlor. When she leaves, there is a metal stud in the cartilage of her right ear, silver bright against her skin. 

It hurt like a bitch, which surprised Mary given how much the hunting life has battered her. Still, she’s never gotten used to the pain of her skin splitting. This was a good pain, though, one she controlled and one that made her feel somehow in control of her body. She’s never had piercings before; they were a hazard on a hunt, when any monster could take advantage of them and pull. But this one doesn’t feel dangerous, it just feels like it’s hers. 

When Ketch sees it, he smiles. 

“Hitting your rebellious phase late in life, are we?” he says, light enough that it’s a joke. 

“I’m thirty,” she says with mock offense. 

The piercing hurts for a long time, sometimes enough that she can’t sleep with that ear on the pillow. But she works through it, stubbornly ignoring it and cleaning it with her bottle of saline twice a day until the pain almost doesn’t come when she accidentally nudges it. 

She stands in their latest motel bathroom and looks at the silver glinting in the light. That is something that was hers, that and her still-short hair. Something that she’s done for herself since her resurrection, that shows she is adapting to life in 2017, allowing herself to change. Things, she thinks, are good. 

That night, she and Ketch are doing recon, which means Ketch is trying (and succeeding) to charm information out of people via his accent alone and Mary is hustling, still unable to give that up after five years of security followed by Ketch’s promises of near-unlimited resources. She just can’t quite trust, not even with all the wealth her boys seem to have, that they won’t all be poor as shit again.

At the end of it, Ketch walks over to her with a phone number scrawled on a bar napkin in his pocket. He sets down a shot of whiskey on the edge of the pool table in front of her, and Mary raises her eyebrows. 

“Thought you’d given up trying to come onto me,” she says, taking the shot anyway.

“It’s not from me,” Ketch says. “That young woman thought I could use a drink, and I disagreed.”

“Unlike you.”

Ketch shrugs, and that’s the end of that. 

He leaves the bar with her that night, and they drive back to their motel in silence. This isn’t what usually happens - even when Ketch doesn’t find someone to go home with (or on the rare occasion that Mary does), they don’t leave together. 

It’s dark in the car, headlights piercing out into the night but the lights on the dash barely bright enough for Mary to see by. They light Ketch’s face in a blue glow when he says “I’ve never had a friend before.”

He doesn’t look at her, and she doesn’t look at him, scanning the side of the road in hopes she’ll see a deer, though it’s unlikely this close to town.

“I’m honored to be the first,” she says, letting just enough sincerity into her voice that he knows she means it. 

Ketch gets called back to headquarters and Mary goes back to the bunker, secure enough in herself that she thinks she can stay a few days with her sons. 

Things are busy when she arrives - something has happened, probably the same thing that made Ketch suddenly too busy to take small-time hauntings and vamp hunts with her. She’s thrown into research, looking through everything on nephilim lore and something about princes of Hell. Mary immediately misses the smaller hunts. Sure, this kind of biblical stuff might be what Sam and Dean deal with on the regular, but it’s still something she isn’t sure how to handle.

Castiel isn’t there, off tracking something down - Lucifer? A woman? - and the bunker feels emptier without him. It wasn’t obvious what a cohesive group the three of them were, Mary reflects, until he was gone. 

Dean keeps his phone next to him constantly, tapping the screen to make sure he didn’t miss a notification every thirty minutes or so.

“He’ll call when he finds anything,” Sam says after the fourth or fifth time he does it.

“I know,” Dean says. “I just. I worry.” 

Sam gives him a look, and Mary says “Castiel will be fine, Dean,” in a way she hopes is reassuring. 

This is yet another thing that confuses Mary. Angels, in her mind, are good, powerful creatures. The kind that come out of the sky and say ‘Be not afraid.’ (According to Dean, Gabriel is actually a partier and kind of a dick, but that’s not important.) And yet she understands why Dean worries about Castiel, and she worries about him too. There is something human about him that makes it hard for her to reconcile the kind man she knows with the fearsome warriors Sam insists angels are. 

Dinner that night isn’t anything special. Or at least, it isn’t to Sam and Dean. But to Mary, who’s spent the last few months living on diner food - because apparently, despite having the full financial power of England behind him, Ketch still didn’t care enough to shell out for nice food - the Stouffers’ mac n cheese and store-bought rotisserie chicken might as well make it Thanksgiving. Sam had bought some broccoli in a steamer bag, which Dean bitched about, but Mary’s pretty sure most of the bitching was for show. 

So here they are, eating dinner that they cooked - okay, stuck in the oven to warm up - around a table like a family, and Mary’s not quite sure how this is supposed to work. 

“So, Sam,” she says, then pauses awkwardly. She doesn’t really have anything she wants to say, she just doesn’t want it to be quiet. “How’s it going? Find anything in the lore?”

Sam takes a moment to respond, as he has a huge bite of chicken in his mouth. He holds up a finger and attempts to chew as fast as he can so he can respond, which doesn’t work at all. Dean raises an eyebrow and laughs at him.

“Nothing yet,” Sam says when he can finally speak. “Lucifer’s definitely out of the President, but Kelly seems to have disappeared, and I can’t find anything useful on nephilim.” 

Mary nods. She’s starting to get the picture of the situation, and she doesn’t like it. At all. Where had she been while Lucifer was possessing the President? In a motel most likely, or burning the bones of some ghost. 

“Well, we better find her soon,” Dean says. “Cas says nephilim are more powerful than their fathers, and we sure as hell don’t need anything more powerful than the devil running around.” 

Sam asks Dean to pass the broccoli, which is still in the ripped-open steamer bag, and Dean does, grumbling about Sammy’s ‘rabbit food’ the whole time. Sam looks pointedly at the green crumbs still visible on Dean’s plate. Dean crosses his arms and Mary smiles. They seem all right, her boys.

Then Dean’s phone rings, and from how quickly he picks up and walks out of the room, Mary’s sure it’s Cas. She can distantly hear Dean say “Hey, buddy,” as he leaves, and maybe things have changed in the 21st century, but back in the 70s, people who were dating sure didn’t call each other ‘buddy.’ Maybe it’s a front? They haven’t told people yet? But the only people there are to not tell is herself, and Mary doesn’t want to think about Dean staying… she’s pretty sure the phrase is ‘in the closet,’ if Wikipedia taught her anything, because of her. 

As soon as Dean’s out of the room, Mary turns to Sam. 

“Do you normally do this? A sit-down dinner?”

Sam suddenly finds his plate very interesting. “Sometimes,” he says.

“Sometimes.” 

Sam spears a piece of broccoli on his fork but doesn’t bring it to his mouth. “When Cas is here. And we’re not busy.”

“Angels eat?” Mary asks before realizing if she lets Sam get off on a tangent, she’ll never get him back on topic. “Nevermind. But if Castiel isn’t here, and we have a case…”

“Dean wanted to do a family dinner,” Sam said, looking anywhere but at her. “Because you’re here.” 

“Mhm.”

“Do you, uh, not like it?”

Mary looks around at the oven-ready mac n cheese, the rotisserie in its black plastic container. “I do,” she says slowly, “but this isn’t necessary. If you wouldn’t usually do this, you shouldn’t have to.” 

“Dean would’ve done a home-cooked dinner if he could’ve,” Sam says. “Last time Charlie was over, Dean spent practically the whole day in the kitchen. Made a pie and everything.” 

“Charlie?” 

One day, Mary thinks she might know enough about her sons’ lives to stop being lost by every piece of information they throw her way. Maybe. If she’s lucky. 

Sam smiles. “Dean’s best friend. She’s pretty cool. She, uh. Dean would kill me for telling you this, but she got him into LARPing.” Seeing the confusion on Mary’s face, he hastily adds “It’s where they go and dress up as knights and elves and whatever and have battles. There’s a lot of fantasy politics.” 

Mary was never a nerd at school. She wasn’t in with the popular kids, too ingrained in the hunter lifestyle for that, but she was popular enough that she has no idea what Sam’s talking about. “Is that like Dungeons and Dragons?” she asks. 

“Kinda,” Sam says. “But nerdier.” 

She thinks about the Dean she’s met, the one who rambles on about everything but is oddly quiet otherwise, who plays her and John’s music loud in the Impala and is, according to Ketch, considered the best hunter in North America. And who’s also a nerd. Mary sighs and comes to terms with the fact that she has no idea who her son really is. 

“I thought Castiel was Dean’s best friend?” Mary asks, though it’s meant to be a statement. 

Sam gives her a look. It’s the kind of look that says ‘Really? We both know that isn’t true.’ And Mary wants to say something, that she’s happy for the two of them, maybe, but Dean comes back into the room, dropping his phone back in his pocket and looking lighter than he has all day, and she closes her mouth. 

Ketch texts her after a few days.

_ Demons in Big Rapids _ , the message says.  _ Meet you there. _

Michigan’s a pretty damn long way from Kansas, but Mary’s confident she can get there in a day. She’s driven longer stretches. 

_ Be there tonight _ , she texts back and packs her bag. 

The goodbye is short - Sam and Dean are getting ready to head off and meet Castiel somewhere anyway, and a week is really about as long as she can handle living with them. It’s not that she doesn’t love them, it’s just… hard. 

So she jumps into her car as they pile into theirs and head off down opposite directions of the two-lane highway outside the bunker, and after a moment Mary can’t even see them in her rearview. 

The drive is long, and that means Mary has a lot of time alone with her own thoughts. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem. There are two parts of Mary’s life - hunting and John. They don’t mix, and so if she just doesn’t think about John, she can pretend she’s always hunted. 

But now, driving away from her sons’ place (she hesitates to call it a house, as it’s underground and also has like a hundred bedrooms), it’s harder. Because her kids are a part of her life with John, her normal, suburbian life in Lawrence, but this version of them, the adults that they’ve become, are becoming a part of her life as a hunter too. It’s an overlap, and she isn’t quite sure how to deal with that. 

Sitting around a dinner table with Sam and Dean wasn’t quite right. It had been a mirroring of her life before, from when Dean was toddling around trying to help with the cooking - and mostly getting flour everywhere - and Sammy was in a high chair. That’s what Dean had tried to recreate, and it had been strange. Not because John wasn’t there, Mary knows he’s been gone for years and he’d never helped cook anyway. But because it was Dean that was making food while Mary stood around and didn’t know how to help. 

Things were better when they were too busy to even take a break for dinner, when Sam called in a pizza order and they ate it in the library, holding their slices carefully to make sure they didn’t drip grease on their old books. Comfortable, even.

But, for the first time since her resurrection, Mary is looking forward to something. She wants to meet Ketch in Big Rapids, even though he’s weird and kind of annoying and the organization he works for is definitely all kinds of fucked up. Because Ketch is her friend, strange as he is, and he’s something completely separate from her past. 

And that’s good. More than good, really, because it’s given her a chance to move on. To figure out who she is now, in 2017. And she’s a hunter. She’s got - not kids, but family, and a friend, and sometimes she lets herself get picked up at bars. And it’s nice, it’s simple, it’s easy. 

She barely misses the past. 

Ketch looks harried when she meets him, already sitting in a comfortably upholstered chair in a low-budget tex-mex restaurant. Quiet music with lyrics in Spanish plays over the speakers, and there’s a bowl of tortilla chips on the table in front of him, though they’re clearly untouched. 

“Hey,” Mary says, sliding into the other side of the booth and taking a chip. 

He cuts right to the chase. “I assume you’ve heard about Lucifer’s unborn child?”

Mary nods. “Been researching nephilim all week.” 

“There has only been one nephil born in the last century,” Ketch says, voice clipped. “Daughter of a minor angel. Very minor. But a child of Lucifer will have power on a cosmic scale.” 

The waitress comes by, and Mary asks for a water. It’s always been the hunter way to have a beer, and normally she would, just to get under Ketch’s skin with her American-ness. But it’s been a long drive.

“I wasn’t aware there’s another nephil,” Mary says slowly.

“There isn’t.” Ketch meets her eyes, and something in him is more tired than Mary has ever seen him. That tiredness is covered up, though, by a layer of determination. “She was killed by the angel Castiel three years ago.” 

Mary thinks of the kind man she knows, who talked her through what being queer means so she doesn’t offend Dean. Who’s a calm presence in a room, who frets over her boys almost as much as they fret over him. Who has steel behind his eyes and talks of having seen the dawn of man like it was a recent memory. 

“Oh,” she says. 

“I was not tasked with locating the child and its mother,” Ketch says with a look of bitter disappointment, “but I believe that if we find it, it will be of substantial advantage.” 

“To you.” 

Ketch raises his eyebrows, considering. “To us.”

Mary shakes her head. “I’m not a part of your club,” she says. “I’m here to take out some demons, not play office politics.” She takes another chip, scooping salsa on it until it threatens to drip on the table. 

“Have it your way,” Ketch says. “We can start work in the morning. But if you know anything about the nephil…” 

The chip crunches in her mouth. It’s obnoxiously loud, especially in the weighted silence Ketch left. She shrugs, and tilts the basket toward him. “Chip?” she asks. 

That determination doesn’t go away. Ketch doesn’t let himself get distracted from the case, but Mary can tell he’s still thinking about Lucifer’s child. She doesn’t know that much more than he does - only the name of the mother, and that Sam and Dean and Castiel are looking for her. But whereas she doesn’t care to know, Ketch is like a man obsessed. 

After they’ve killed the demons, something Mary still can’t believe they found a way to do in the years she was dead, Mary suggests they head down to a bar. Ketch shakes his head, always keeping one hand near where his phone rested in his pocket. Waiting for intel, maybe, or orders. 

It takes about thirty minutes for Mary to be fed up. There were some things she would do, and sitting around in a motel room awaiting a call from an organization she didn’t know or trust was not one of them. 

“I’m going out,” she said, shrugging on a coat despite the generally warm night air. “You’re welcome to join me.” 

Ketch’s “No, thank you,” reeked of fake politeness, and Mary slipped out of their motel room door before she could say anything back. Not that she knows what she would say - something like ‘Lighten up,’ maybe. Or something a little less friendly. 

Bars are, it turns out, a lot less fun when you’re by yourself. Mary isn’t sure what she’d been expecting, really. Since she’d been resurrected, she’d always gone with Ketch, spending most of her time with him. Before she died, she had been to one only once or twice, on early dates with John. Since they had married, she hadn’t been once. 

She doesn’t even know why she’s here, not really. Except that she couldn’t stay in their room and she didn’t know where else to go.

And it isn’t even that she’s old. She’s not, not even close. But the fact that her body is thirty doesn’t mean she’s as young as some of these other people, the twentysomethings looking to get laid, and she’s not as worn down as the older folks, drinking by themselves or in small groups, heads low over their glasses. 

A guy offers to buy her a drink, but he’s tall and his hair is long and in the dim light of the bar, he almost looks like Sam, so Mary declines as politely as possible. She plays a game of pool, but she barely makes twenty bucks and the competition was a college kid so bad at the game that Mary blew him out of the water - no one will believe she’s a mediocre enough player to bet against after that game. 

So she heads to the bar, and because she doesn’t want to be lonely, she strikes up a conversation with a woman who looks to be in a similar situation. 

The woman might be a little older than her, but it’s hard to tell. She’s sitting on a barstool, brown hair cut even shorter than Mary’s, and wearing a worn-thin Queen tour shirt, which, weird choice, but whatever. 

“You lost?” the woman asks. It could easily have been rude, but somehow, it isn’t. “Haven’t seen you here before.” 

“Just passing through.” Mary’s always just passing through, now. Sometimes, when she wakes up on an old motel bed, she misses her house in Lawrence, the way the light would come in through the window in the same way every morning. Having John beside her, most of the time. Times like tonight, she misses the security of it. The way she was never lonely, not even when she and John fought, because she had her sons. 

“Road trip by yourself?”

“For work.” 

Mary has slipped back into the lies, the secrecy that comes with hunting like a second skin, but the woman doesn’t ask her what she does for a living, and Mary’s glad. 

It’s the cheesiest line in the book, but Mary doesn’t even register that until after she’s said “So I take it you come here often.” 

Her face starts to go red, but the woman just chuckles. “Now and again.” 

The bartender comes by, and Mary gets a whiskey because she’s pretty sure that’s what runs in the veins of American hunters - of her father, and now, she supposes, her boys. She asks the woman, who says her name is Lynn, if she’s drinking even though she can see the empty glass in front of her. Lynn orders a dark & stormy, and things are quiet. 

It’s nice just to talk. Lynn tells her about a road trip she took once, the year after high school, living in the back of a VW van through Alaska and down the west coast. Mary tells her what she can - that she travels for work, that she’d been settled down once and that she can’t cook without setting off the fire alarm, though John had never learned that. 

Lynn laughs at that one, says something about how cooking’s an art, and Mary says she thinks Dean would agree. She almost slips and calls Dean her son, but if Lynn asks how old he is, there’s no way Mary can explain that while she might be thirty, her son is thirty-eight. So she calls him her brother, and it feels wrong coming out of her mouth but Lynn smiles with the side of her mouth and tells Mary about how her brother once accidentally put salt instead of sugar in their parents’ anniversary cake, and everything’s okay. 

It’s around eleven when Lynn looks Mary in the eyes and says “I don’t know what you’re gunnin’ for here, and I’m okay to keep talking, but if you wanna get out of here, I’m down.” 

Mary’s eyebrows jump to somewhere near her hairline, and her thought process freezes. 

“Get out of here?” she repeats weakly. 

Lynn looks concerned, now. “Yeah,” she says. “You know…” She points a finger between herself and Mary and gestures toward the door with her head. 

And then Mary gets it. She’s just spent the last couple hours talking with (what’s the word?) a lesbian, who thinks Mary might be into her. 

This is a completely new experience. She thinks she’s pretty used to queer men by now - and is thinking that something insensitive? Since they’re just men, not anything abnormal like she’d grown up learning? - but she’s never met a queer woman before, much less been overly propositioned by one. 

But she’s taking too long to reply, so Lynn says “Guess that’s a no on getting out of here, then.” 

Mary nods. 

“You seem pretty freaked,” Lynn observes, taking a sip of what’s left of her drink. 

“I, um.” Mary has no idea what to say here. She’s talked to a grand total of two people about this kind of stuff, and she’d pissed off one and the other was a literal angel and also her son’s probably-boyfriend. “I didn’t know you were. A lesbian?”

“Does that bother you?”

“No,” Mary says, too quickly. She wonders how she was supposed to know. Whether there were signals that a woman was flirting with her that she’d just never learned. 

Then it hits her. She’d walked over to this woman in a bar. She’d bought her a drink. Which, in her mind, had been totally normal because Lynn is a woman, even though if she’d been a man Mary would have considered it flirting. Shit. 

Does it count as flirting if she didn’t know she was doing it? Have other women flirted with her in the past and it’s gone completely over her head? 

“‘Kay,” Lynn says. And clearly she can see that something’s going on in Mary’s head, because instead of getting mad, or offended, she says “If you’re gonna have some kind of crisis, the fire escape’s better for it than the bathroom. More private, and the smell’s better too.” 

The casualness with which she said that pushed back Mary’s thoughts for a moment. “Does this happen to you often?”

Lynn smiles, and there’s a sadness in her eyes. “No,” she says, “but I can tell you sitting by myself on the floor of the handicap stall was just about the least pleasant way to accept that I like women, and they haven’t redone those bathrooms in the past decade.”

Mary gets out an aborted “I don’t-” before she nods toward the rear exit and says “I’m gonna go.” 

“I hope you figure yourself out,” Lynn says, melancholy but well-meaning. 

Mary nods, and then she’s dropping money on the bar to cover her tab and on her way out the back.

Lynn was right - the fire escape is nice. It’s coming up on summer again, but this far north, late spring heat goes away at night. The air is just on the chilly side of crisp, and Mary pulls her jacket around her as she leans on the rickety metal railing. 

Every bone in her body is screaming at her to not think about it. Things are easier if she doesn’t think about them, if she just keeps operating the same as she’s always done. But that doesn’t work for hunting anymore, not with how much bigger the universe has gotten. And it apparently doesn’t work in her personal life anymore, not now that pretty much everyone she knows is queer and she’s just spent the last few hours chatting - maybe flirting? Maybe? - with a lesbian in a bar. What if that happens again? How is she supposed to know?

She doesn’t sit down, because sitting down is admitting some kind of defeat. Instead, she looks out into the night, arms pressed against the railing. She can’t see far; the lights from the bar bounce off the smoke and clouds to make the night hazy and gray. 

Mary thinks of Lynn, still sitting inside at the bar, probably feeling shitty. Because that couldn’t feel good, right? To be talking to someone and for them to suddenly freak out about your sexuality? Of course, it wasn’t like Mary could go back inside and say ‘Hey, I’m not freaking out about you, I’m freaking out because I died in 1984 and haven’t met a lesbian before.” Because that doesn’t make her sound any less awful. 

The thing is, she likes Lynn. She liked talking to her, and there has to have been some reason why she chose Lynn out of everyone at the bar to spend her evening talking to. If she wasn’t using the cold night air to keep herself grounded, she would go back inside and keep talking to Lynn. 

Because, she realizes, she isn’t bothered that Lynn was interested in her. She’s bothered that she hadn’t noticed. And not in a bad way, either. Not in an ‘I need to keep that from happening again’ way. 

Mary knows, objectively, that she’s attractive. That men like her. And, apparently, women as well. Which, again, she doesn’t have a problem with. She just doesn’t understand what women find attractive in other women. Well. Presumably the same things men find attractive, right? 

And Mary’s really, really not sure why she’s thinking about this, but she finds herself going through a mental list of things she liked about Lynn, as though to reassure herself that she wasn’t attracted to her. 

The main thing she kept coming back to was that, well, Lynn was nice. She was young but already had wrinkles at the edges of her eyes from smiling, and that smile had been genuine. Mary caught the thought that she might like to see that smile again flitting through her mind before she sighed and looked up at the sky. 

This was stuff she remembers thinking about John. She’d liked his music and the way he seemed so genuine and she’d liked it when he smiled. John would’ve hated her for thinking pretty similar stuff about a woman. But hey. Castiel had said God is queer. So why can’t she be?

She’s not ready to commit to that, to actively think that about herself. But she can toy with it, think about thinking about it, maybe.

Ketch is awake when she slips back into their motel room late that night. 

“Mary?” he asks cautiously. “Are you all right?”

Mary is silent as she slips off her shoes, shrugs her jacket onto the floor. 

“It’s one in the morning,” Ketch says. “You could have died.” 

“You’ve been out later.”

He raises his eyebrows, considering. “I have.” He’s silent for a moment, long enough for Mary to gather her pajamas and start to walk to the bathroom, before he asks “Where did you go?”

“I went for a walk,” Mary says. It’s not a lie, exactly. She did walk to and from the bar, and she walked several blocks out of her way on the route back to take extra time to think. She just doesn’t see the need to tell him everything else, not yet. For now, this thought she’s working over is only hers. 

They’re sitting in Ketch’s car a week later, on a stakeout for a pretty low-key vamp nest. It’s warm out, now that they’ve driven south through Illinois, so the car is off. 

They haven’t seen any activity from the nest all day, so Mary asks, completely out of nowhere, “How did you know you like men as well?”

Ketch, who has the misfortune to be taking a drink from his water bottle when she says that, splutters and accidentally splashes some of the water onto his suit. 

“How did I what?” he repeats. 

“You know,” Mary says. “How did you find out you like men as well as women?”

Ketch gives her a look that says he is not at all pleased with this line of inquiry. “I fucked a couple of boys in high school,” he says, the word ‘fuck’ sounding impossibly out of place with his put-together, stuck-up exterior. 

Mary gives him another look, one that says being unhelpful on purpose is childish of him. 

There is a long pause before Ketch says “I don’t know. Why does it matter?” 

“I think I might like women as well,” Mary says in a perfectly flat tone. It’s the same tone she would use to tell Ketch it’s raining out, or that they need to pull off the highway for gas. 

“Okay,” Ketch says.

“Okay.”

The vamps don’t come out until after the sun sets, and even then, it’s only three of them. They take them out in no time, untie the kids they’d kidnapped to drain, and drive back to the motel in silence, blood spattering their collars.

The next time she and Ketch are driving through Kansas, on their way to the nearer part of Nevada after getting wind of what sounded like angels, they stop at the bunker.

Mary calls ahead, asking if they’re home. Calling that place home, even if she only means it about her boys, still feels weird. It doesn’t make sense that they could have taken something as big and old and empty as that bunker and made it feel friendly, but somehow, they have. 

“Yeah, we’re around,” Sam says. “Probably won’t be for long, though. Kelly’s been on the run almost seven months.”

That means only two more months to find her, Mary thinks. For Ketch to do whatever he’s trying to do, whether that’s kill the child before it’s born or use its power. Only two more months of distracting him with other cases.

“I was thinking we could stop by for dinner,” Mary says. “Since we’re in the area.” 

It’s been a few months since the last time Mary saw her sons. If she’s going to be a part of their lives, she should stop by every now and again.

“I’d like that,” Sam says. “Who’s ‘we?’”

Mary looks at the carpeted ceiling of her car. “Ketch,” she says. “Me and Ketch.” Ketch, sitting in the passengers’ seat doing something on his phone, raises his eyebrows but blissfully doesn’t say anything.

“I’m not sure that’s the best idea.” 

It’s not, and Mary knows it. “It’ll only be for dinner.” 

Sam doesn’t say anything for a moment, thinking. “Okay,” he says eventually. “Tonight?”

“We’ll see you.” 

Things, unsurprisingly, don’t go well. Dean and Ketch don’t speak to each other, and the dislike that shimmers off Dean is palpable whenever Ketch is in the room. It doesn’t help that Ketch tries his damn hardest to seem like the best hunter imaginable whenever he knows Dean can hear him. It’s even more exhausting than normal, and that’s saying something.

“Ketch,” Mary says after forty-five excruciating minutes. “Can you take my car to the store? Apparently there’s no beer.” 

Dean hands Ketch a shopping list containing significantly more than beer and smiles aggressively. He watches Ketch until he’s out the front door of the bunker, and only then does he relax.

“You don’t have to worry about him,” Mary says. She is very sure that they do have to worry about his superiors, and Ketch’s loyalty to the group is worrying at best. But that’s not a problem for now. That’s something for after Lucifer’s baby is born and when the world doesn’t feel like it’s tearing itself apart. 

Dean looks at her in disbelief and returns to the kitchen.

“Sorry about him,” Sam says. He has a rag in his hand and is hastily scrubbing bottom-of-coffee-mug rings off the table. “He’s been on edge lately.” 

“It seems like he’s on edge a lot,” Mary says. This isn’t meant to be a judgement, but she can hear how it sounds as soon as it leaves her mouth. 

Sam shrugs apologetically. “You know how Cas isn’t here?”

Mary nods. She had noticed the distinct lack of the bunker’s resident angel, but things were tense enough having Ketch here, she’d been almost glad he was gone. 

“He’s protecting Kelly and the baby. Won’t tell us where they are, went radio silent two weeks ago after Dean said he didn’t trust that the kid wouldn’t go darkside.”

“Don’t tell Ketch that. He’s looking for the baby too.” 

Sam locks eyes with her. “Are you helping him?” 

“It’s a baby,” Mary says. “I’d like to believe it doesn’t have to be like its father.”

Sam nods, looking back down at the table. It’s definitely clean, but he wipes it off one more time anyway. 

“Don’t bring up Cas,” Sam says eventually. “Dean’s… sensitive about it right now.” 

“I’m sensitive about what?” Dean says, entering the room. He glowers when Sam and Mary both clam up. “I’m not some goddamn widow waiting for my husband to return from the war or some shit. Cas is his own person. He can do whatever the hell he wants.” 

Still, nobody says anything, and Dean leaves the way he came. He only returns when Ketch comes back and drops a bag of groceries on the table, and even then he waits until Ketch is out of the room to grab the food. 

When Mary hugs Dean goodbye the next morning, her and Ketch having crashed in two of the bunker’s million guest bedrooms, she says “Things will get better. You and Castiel have a good thing, and it’ll take a lot more than one superpowered baby to break that.” 

Dean, who thankfully is in a better mood than he’d been at dinner, draws his eyebrows together, his forehead wrinkling. “What?” 

“I know you’re fighting,” Mary says, “but it’s just one fight. You’ll be fine.” 

She doesn’t know why she’s giving advice. It’s not like her relationship experience is exactly anything to be proud of - one rocky marriage and a steadily-growing string of one-night stands, still mostly with men. But Dean’s upset, and even if she doesn’t know how to connect with him, she can at least try. 

There is a distinct moment where Mary can see Dean understand. 

“Me and Cas are just friends,” he says slowly. 

But they definitely are, so Mary says “It’s okay. You don’t have to keep it from me. I’ve learned a lot recently, I’m not going to judge you for it. I’ve actually decided I like women as well.” 

“That’s not something you decide, Mom,” Dean starts.

“Realized, then. Whatever. The point is, I’m happy for you and Castiel, even if things are rough right now.” 

Dean opens and closes his mouth twice before saying “...Right. Thanks.” 

Her job done, Mary climbs into her car, Ketch already in the passenger seat. It’s a long drive to Nevada. Before they’re out of the garage, though, Mary can see Dean digging his phone out of his pocket, pacing as he types something. 

“Your son’s a dick,” Ketch says, and Mary just laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this!! I'm thinking about writing more about Mary - she's just such an interesting character to me. Comments would really make my day, and you can also find me on tumblr @alpacasandravens.


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